mahiwaga

It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation. — Rudolf Virchow

(gleaned from happylittletree5)

Yes, that Rudolf Virchow, the dude who lurks in all 2nd year medical students brains, famous for the left supraclavicular lymph node that heralds gastric cancer, and for the triad that explains the pathophysiology of deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolism.

But I digress.

I am frequently amazed and not a little horrified to see the sorts of conditions that human beings can adapt to. Neverending war. Famine. Plague. The conditions of the apocalypse are already present on earth right now and sometimes even in the U.S., maybe not even a block away from where you live, and many of us go blissfully along, unaware.

On one hand, you can look at the tragedy and horror that many people are damned to and realize that you are probably extraordinarily lucky, and that you should count your lucky stars that you aren’t in prison, you have a place to live, you have food to eat.

On the other hand, it makes it harder and harder to believe that a benign hyperintelligence (hereafter abbreviated to “God”) is actually running this place.

Interestingly, I was gazing absently at ESPN this afternoon and they ran a little retrospective on Magic Johnson’s announcement about having HIV, which happened 15 years ago on this day. I remember it rather starkly. My mom was taking me, my brother, and my sister to school when we heard it on the radio.

You stop and think about all the kids with HIV in Africa who don’t even make it for 15 months, and I can’t help but wonder why the older antiretrovirals aren’t as cheap as penicillin yet. 15 years is plenty of time to turn a profit, especially when you consider the numbers just in the U.S. (over a million cases and counting.)

But whatever, I have smaller fish to fry. I’m not going to save the world from rapacious pharmaceutical companies just quite yet.

I’m grinding my teeth, thinking about what happens next, and what the next 18 months will mean.

At the breakneck pace life seems to be going these days, I fear it will fly by so fast my head will spin.

It’s interesting how certain things will bubble up and become compelling. It starts as a single drop of water, a single grain of dust. That’s all that it takes, and then it starts building up to a great humongous cloud bank ready to pour gallons of rain down upon you for 40 days and 40 nights.

I’m not at that point yet, the point where things get black as night, and ominous.

I’m just a black little cloud floating in the otherwise serene blue sky. (Winnie the Pooh comes to mind. That, and admitting a raftload of patients to the hospital.)

One is chance, two is coincidence, three is uncanny. Or that’s how the mind is programmed to think. When you look at it from an objective viewpoint, it’s just another coincidence. At three, you start thinking uncalled-for thoughts. Ideas of streaks, of patterns, of inevitabilities dance in front of your eyes, and yet your just a little ways down on the gentle incline into impossibility. With an event that had a 99% chance of happening anyway, you’re looking at 97% for three things in a row happening. It’s not that unlikely. You would be a fool to bet against it. (Unless you’re incredibly unlucky and tend to lose easy bets.)

Back to my point, or maybe this meandering madness is the point. I have no center. There is no point on the map where I can home into and call that zero, zero. I have no coordinates. I’m just adrift in a sea of homogeneity and unending sameness.

Which way to go?

Why am I even thinking about these things? Except for the fact that people keep asking me questions these days.

Holy hell.

Can’t I just cower in this little corner I’ve imprisoned myself in, and just pace back and forth for the rest of my remaining days?

I could eat rocks right now, bite into steel girders. In this early morning, the poisons swirling, the acid in my belly roiling, I’m trying to concentrate, trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

In this maze of doubt, this labyrinthine maniacal madness enshrouded by the fog of despair, I am running down corridors, trying to find a way out, as my soul catches fire, I’m trying to escape before it all burns down.

The words come tumbling down like boulders from an avalanche, with no rhyme or reason. I am frothing at the mouth, trying to make sense of the senseless. I don’t know whether I am coming or going, whether I have trod this narrow path before, if I am running around in circles crying out that the sky is falling.

I don’t know what to believe any more.

Six years ago I started this harebrained odyssey, inadvertantly charting the decay of the Republic of my birth, this beacon of Freedom that was falling into decadence and metastasizing into Empire. Amidst the tumult of a nation coming crashing down around me, I burrowed into my little worries and cares, my small personal battles, the silly advances and retreats of the armed forces fighting for control of my soul. I had grown tired of scrawling my raving madness into notebooks that no one would ever read. I demanded that at least Google would become witness to my evolution (or my unraveling—the end of this story still remains to be seen.)

Six years and now, after the bitter loneliness, the aching hurt of being betrayed by my own country, six years of being exiled without ever leaving the land of my birth, I have hope again.

In the big picture, what does it mean? I know that in the end, it doesn’t matter. Whoever has the power hoards it unto themselves and I will never get a taste of the pluripotence. But there is something, to see the dark mischief, the diabolical schemes of those who would sell our country to the Devil and those who would defecate on the Constitution, to see all those things burn away. I’m not ready to believe it. It’s like almost waking from an endless nightmare, with the terror and the madness clearing with the coming of the sunlight touching my face.

I am ranting and raving, and I feel like I’ve spent the whole six years wandering around in circles, treading paths that I had long ago trodden, spinning mindlessly, looking for something that I am perhaps destined never to find.

Looking for something I had lost, something that I had never had. Looking for squandered potentiality, I suppose. Chances that were inadvertantly discarded and given up for lost. Opportunities overlooked. Hopes forgotten. I’ve scavenged through the rotting scraps of what I used to believe in, what I used to hope for, and find nothing but thin wispy thoughts evaporating at the touch of my hand.

What is the use of hope, when destiny has already doomed you?

And yet I fled into the night, feeling that I was chasing something of my own volition, that no matter what dark, desperate Fate is in store for me, the time in the interim was mine to use as I saw fit.

I am unbounded, and that scares the living shit out of me.

Or I could just be going completely insane.

Either way.

Oh, the violent emptiness seething with infinite possibilities, spacetime roiling and foaming like the inchoate rage of some savage beast. My soul rocks and shudders. Like electric sparks tingling through my soul.

Where do I go? What do I do next? Give me direction for just the next moment. Leave the end out of my sight if you must.

Bizarre ideas and strange concepts keep infiltrating my thoughts. No, it’s not like I’m hallucinating, and I’m not experiencing thought broadcasting, either. It’s just that I can’t seem to find the right words to describe how I’m feeling right now. My brain is topsy-turvy, and I hoping to find somewhere to land and set myself aright, but I’m afraid of losing momentum, of crashing down and facing grim reality.

(How did I think it would end, anyway? Could things have been different?)

The problem is simply a failure of the imagination. If I could picture where I wanted to be, then I could make some plans, but everything that I imagine is either ridiculous fantasy, or some circumscribed, hopelessly limited version of what I imagine would be ideal.

(Man, don’t you love how I always use circumlocutions? And never directly talk about the concept at hand?)

I am still reeling from how the American public managed to take back their country. Part of me kept imagining something catastrophic would happen, that somehow the fascist bastards would be able to clamp down and steal the franchise. Now I’m not imagining that things are going to turn into utopia any time soon. But it’s interesting. People as disparate as Pat Buchanan and posters of the Daily Kos are asking if this is the end of the conservative movement. I had prophesied that the conservatives were on their way out like the conservatives got kicked out of the U.S.S.R. In the same way that communism collapsed, the neocon agenda has crumpled like an empty aluminum can. I’ve always argued that the neocons are relics from an era long past. These fools are still reacting—a little too late—to the social revolutions of the 1960s, in the same way that the die-hard regime in the U.S.S.R. were trying to pretend that the 1980s and the Fall of the Berlin Wall never happened.

In that sense, I kind of imagine Gorbachev and Clinton having parallel roles. While it may be misleading because Clinton is a Democrat, he was never a leftist. At most, I would give him center-left, but mostly, he was pretty centrist about things. Of course, he had to deal with an antagonistic legislative branch (though maybe in the next two years, we’ll see what it really means to be antagonistic) and so he had to make a lot of compromises, plus the right-wing attack machine was pretty well honed.

In another parallel, maybe W’s erstwhile presidency is comparable to the hard-line commies’ failed coup attempt back when the U.S.S.R. was disintegrating.

Although what this means, economically-speaking, is a little frightening.

But I dig it. A call to look forwards, not backwards (upwards, not sideways, and always twirling, twirling…) We’re done with the 1960s and the resultant backlash. We are not going back to the 1950s. It’s been half a century already, for God’s sake! It’s the 21st century!

There are new challenges to face. It’s not this simplistic dichotomy that the neocons were hoping to preserve. There is nothing useful about the labels conservative vs. liberal, capitalist vs. socialist. Divisive paradigms are not viable.

Completely randomly, I think of the Internet as a paradigm. Yahoo and others first tried organizing the net with hierarchies of categories, trying to delimit things into one category or another. This was initially useful, but the net got too big, and the categories became too constraining. This is the problem of divisive, splitting paradigms. It doesn’t scale. So fast-forward to the Web 2.0, and look at del.icio.us and flickr, and think of tags. We’re done with trying to pigeonhole ideas into a single slot. We let strict distinctions fade away, allow random and sometimes bizarre connections to persist. This gives us a more powerful environment with which to organize our information. And the other thing is that, instead of the power to classify lying in the hands of a few, in the hands of the site builders, tags are purely democratic. You get to choose, and just by sheer weight, consensus manages to form.

Now don’t get me wrong. Democracy, by it’s very nature, is messy, and sometimes not a little bloody. (Just remember what Jefferson said about watering the tree of patriots.) But we have the tools, we just need the talent.

Fuck dichotomy. We are living in world that is way too complex for binary thinking. We need to think in tag clouds, in associative networks. Categories are not hard and fast, but arranged by convenience. Don’t assume that just because something is old means that something is worthwhile. Dogma must stand the test of use.

This world is far too complicated to be able to just suck on the tit of ignorance. You are an active agent in all of this. You have freedom, whether you want it or not. No one is going to tell you how to live your life. It’s up to you to create your living space.

The is the post-post-modern world unfettered, people. Ignorance is the enemy, and it must be destroyed quite utterly.